Politicians are the new maharajas, but with a difference: if the kings of old delivered on
their promises, the present lot don't! The following tale bears this out.

A couple of months after becoming prime minister, H D Deve Gowda visited Gujarat. In Ahmedabad, he was taken round the Sardar Patel museum. Housed in a historic building which
till the late 60s had served as the chief commissioner's bungalow, the
place was a mess, all run-down. The PM was appalled by the sight. The septuagenarian members of the Sardar Patel
Trust who managed the museum told Deve Gowda how for want of funds
they could not undertake even bare minimum repairs.

"Give Rs 10 million to the
trust," he ordered on the spot,
much like a maharaja of the old.

Next day, most Gujarat dailies recorded Deve Gowda's
magnanimous gesture. And happy trustees started looking
eagerly at the postman
whenever he passed their gates. But, even
after a month, the promised cheque failed to arrive.

The trustees, hence, wrote to the Prime Minister's Office reminding
it of Deve Gowda's promise. No response. Not even an
acknowledgement of their letter. Two years and several reminders
later, the trust has now finally given up chasing the
elusive Rs 10 million.

Interestingly, the trust may have fallen victim to its own
greed. The building, where once the ICS brother of poet
laureate Rabindranath Tagore lived as the commissioner of the Ahmedabad range, was maintained
by the Public Works Department as
long as it was state property. But the trustees insisted on
it being leased out to them for Rs 1 per annum. Reluctantly the
state government did so. Now it is the trustees' grouse that the
PWD does not spend even a paise on its upkeep!

You can't have it both ways, can you?

Caste, YES bar!

Here is tomorrow's news today: The Atal Bihari Vajpayee government has in principle decided
to abandon the move to collect caste data in
the forthcoming national census.

The previous government had
initiated the inclusion of caste data in the national
census. Caste was one of the key inputs in it
earlier in the century. The British were obliged to exclude caste data following protests by nationalists.

The demand for collecting such data had assumed special
significance after seats in Parliament and most state
legislatures had come to be
reserved for backward castes in the wake of
the Mandal Commission report. The Constitution does not
provide for caste reservations barring for those belonging to the
scheduled castes and tribes. It was to be a one-off provision
which the founding fathers envisaged, but only for 10 years.

Senior BJP and RSS leaders, wrongly denounced
for a move not initiated by them, were persuaded to give up the
idea of making a caste profile of India by a couple of Hindutva
intellectuals. They feared the collection of caste data
would sound the death knell of
the Hindu society.

"It would divide Hindus like nothing
else had done before it and the anti-Hindu
elements would exploit the data to torpedo whatever unity
there is in the Hindu samaj," they said.

The angry old man

AIADMK boss J Jayalalitha isn't the only one angry with the BJP
leadership. There are other angry old people too, like the Akali leaders.

The latest irritant in the once
lovey-dovey BJP-Akali ties
is the Vajpayee government's failure to sanction a Rs 120 billion refinery
in Bhatinda. The Planning Commission is
dragging its feet on the
project.

Besides this, Punjab Chief Minister
Parkash Singh Badal is also miffed by Vajpayee's failure to appoint one of his nominees as the governor of
Rajasthan. The last incumbent in the Jaipur Raj Bhavan, Darbara
Singh, was an Akali nominee who
died of a heart attack within a couple of weeks of assuming charge. Badal proposed
the name of an Akali
member of the Rajya Sabha for replacing Darbara Singh. But thus far
there has been no response from the central
government.

Since Union Agriculture Minister and senior Akali
leader Surjeet Singh Barnala is opposed to Badal's gubernatorial nominee, the delay in the latter's appointment is
causing the CM further annoyance. Badal is now beginning to
give public vent to his dissatisfaction. Happily for the BJP, thanks to Jayalalitha's high-voltage tantrums, the media isn't paying Badal's muted criticism much attention!

Buying land while the govt shines

It is an old modus operandi of politicians: Privy to advance information about the proposed sanction of a new
colony or a new road, they move in fast to profit from it, strategically buying land before the official announcement. When
the price goes up, they make a killing off-loading their
excessive land acquisitions in the market. BJP politicians in the capital were quick to learn these money-making tricks
practised for long by their Congress predecessors.

Weeks before the decision to build a new express
highway between North Delhi and Haryana was made public, Delhi
Chief Minister Sahib Singh Verma's confidant and parliamentary secretary Nand Kishore Garg bought acre upon acre of land earmarked precisely for the proposed highway. Garg acquired the land in his name and in the name of his relatives
according to the registration papers shown to this columnist.

He now stands to make a huge profit as the government is expected to acquire the land bought by him. The statutory per acre compensation
fixed by the government is way higher
than the prevailing market rate in the area.